Concentrations of poverty lunge deep into suburbs

Concentrations of poverty shown on Myron Orfield’s maps lunge deep into the suburbs, suggesting a dynamic that could leave cities like Brooklyn Center, Columbia Heights and other suburban communities as beleaguered as north Minneapolis, Orfield believes.

“Probably (with) worse problems,” said Orfield, director of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota.

Suburbs are vulnerable, he explained.

“The central city has a certain amount of horsepower,” Orfield said.

“It has a big downtown tax base. It has wealthy neighborhoods. There’s a certain stability in these big cities that these first- and second-ring suburbs aren’t going to have,” he said.

Orfield, a former Democratic lawmaker, author and expert on regional growth issues, said changes in Twin Cities’ suburbs have been “really dramatic,” but not unexpected.

Indeed, he’s been talking about them and anticipating them since the early 1990s, he said.

Orfield views a debilitating cycle at work in a growing area of the suburbs, one creating low-opportunity neighborhoods, struggling schools, stressed local government.

He depicts it as fueled, to a great extent, by a failure at providing affordable housing equitably across the entire metro area, a failure he places at the doorstep of the Metropolitan Council.

It’s a failure of leadership, Orfield argues.

“I think it ought to be elected,” Orfield said of the council, whose members are appointed by the governor.

“It ought to be accountable (to voters),” he said.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the council began to backslide from policies it followed for more than 20 years, such as affordable housing being a prerequisite for gaining regional amenities in outer-ring suburbs, Orfield said.

“They really defeated this (concentration-of-poverty) problem, and then they just dropped the ball,” Orfield said.

“And it wasn’t racists who did it; it was just dumb,” he said.

In their book Region, by Orfield and Institute on Race and Poverty researcher Thomas Luce Jr., the men argue that ill-directed federal housing programs have contributed to concentrations of poverty.

For instance, in an analysis of low-income housing under the federal Section 8 program, the authors argue that, as with the Low-Income House Tax Credit Program, Section 8 housing units and vouchers are disproportionately centered in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and “stressed” inner suburbs where the population of minority and low-income people is already high.

Indeed, more than three-quarters of metro area residents of color live in the central cities and stressed suburbs — suburban cities such as Crystal, Fridley, Robbinsdale and Coon Rapids — with only two-fifths of the region’s white residents living in “low-opportunity” communities.

Racial diversity, Orfield and Luce argue, is often merely a “temporary stop” on the road to persistent segregation.

According to the authors, the “turnover point” at which a neighborhood is likely to resegregate is low — for white/black or multi-ethnic integrated neighborhoods between 30 and 38 percent nonwhite, they say.

“People may be fleeing increasing concentrations of poverty as much at they’re fleeing black people, or Latino people, or Asian people. I think that’s what people are really choosing against,” said Orfield.

Concentration of poverty — the creation of low-opportunity neighborhoods — has a corrosive affect on the middle-class attitudes and values many people, of all races, strongly feel.

“You live in a community that’s upwardly mobile, it pulls you up,” Orfield said.

“A good kid in a bad neighborhood can get pulled into trouble,” he said.

Public schools reflect the concentration of poverty afflicting the metro, Orfield argues.

Indeed, an unhealthy synergy exists between the two.

Metro schools are segregating, Orfield said.

According to Orfield and Luce, two decades ago, just nine elementary schools in the metro were nonwhite segregated. But by 2008, the number had jumped to 108, or 23 percent.

Almost all of these school have high-poverty rates, the men point out.

Over the same time, the number of integrated schools increased, but with a twist.

The increase — a jump from 22 percent to 37 percent — reflects the fact white students were less likely to attend all-white schools.

But in the meantime, the percentage of black and Hispanic students attending nonwhite segregated schools skyrocketed, almost quadrupling for blacks to 51 percent and bounding for Hispanic students from 3 percent to 43 percent.

In essence, students of color increasingly attend segregated schools with other students of color but not with whites, Orfield and Luce argue.

With good planning, schools should last for generations, said Orfield.

But in the Twin Cites, beginning in the late 1960s and over the next 20 years, 150 schools were closed in the middle of the region and 50 opened at the edge.